Due to the proliferation of wireless networks, there are a continually increasing number of wireless devices in use today. These devices include mobile telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) with wireless communication capabilities, two-way pagers and the like. Concurrently with the increase of available wireless devices, software applications running on such devices have increased their utility. For example, the wireless device may include an application that retrieves a weather report for a list of desired cities or an application that allows a user to shop for groceries. These software applications take advantage of the ability to transmit data of the wireless network in order to provide timely and useful services to users, often in addition to voice communication. However, due to a plethora of different types of devices, restricted resources of some devices, and complexity of delivering large amounts of data to the devices, developing software applications remains a difficult and time-consuming task.
Currently, devices are configured to communicate with Web services through Internet-based browsers and/or native applications. Browsers have the advantage of being adaptable to operate on a cross-platform basis for a variety of different devices, but have a disadvantage of requesting pages (screen definitions in HTML) from the Web service, which hinders the persistence of data contained in the screens. A further disadvantage of browsers is that the screens are rendered at runtime, which can be resource intensive. Applications for browsers are efficient tools for designing platform independent applications. Accordingly, different runtime environments, regardless of the platform, execute the same application. However, since difference wireless devices have different capabilities and form factors, the application may not be executed or displayed as desired. Further, browser-based applications often require significant transfer bandwidth to operate efficiently, which may be costly or even unavailable for some wireless devices.
On the other hand, native applications are developed for a specific wireless device platform, thereby providing a relatively optimized application program for a runtime environment running on that platform. However, a platform dependent application introduces several drawbacks, including having to develop multiple versions of the same application and being relatively large in size, thereby taxing memory resources of the wireless device. Further, application developers need experience with programming languages such as Java and C++ to construct such native applications.
Presently, there is little automated functionality testing done for wireless component applications. Due to the disparities in hardware and software between the various platforms, a generalized application is not a viable choice since it cannot easily (if at all) be adapted to the applications being tested. For wireless component applications, this problem is compounded by the fact that each application may be different. Unit testing that covers functionality on a per-module scale is employed, but is not relevant when the system as a whole is tested (each module can operate perfectly on its own, but create a disaster when linked with the rest). Manual testing by developers and testers is an effective way of finding bugs, but is by no means efficient. It is expensive, time-consuming and not very exhaustive. The present patent disclosure offers an alternate way of efficiently testing applications automatically and in an exhaustive fashion.